Our Friend (2019)
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
After learning that his terminally ill wife has six months to live, a man welcomes the support of his best friend who moves into their home to help out.
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What critics say influenced Our Friend
It’s tough for a harrowing, essentially unrelenting film like this to break through to wider audiences, although Love Story (1970) and Terms Of Endearment (1983) are admittedly two exceptions to the rule, and recent teen dramas such as The Fault In Our Stars (2014) have also bucked the trend.
Make no illusions that this is a Love Story sort of tale, but it is one full of heart and centered on someone not in the immediate family.
It reads as an angry corrective to gauzy, romanticized tear-jerkers such as “Love Story” and the like, which is ironic considering that OUR FRIEND , the beautifully acted, big-screen adaptation of Teague’s tale, falls prey to every cleaned-up cliché he spent the story railing against.
Imagine “Love Story,” except there’s a third member of the couple dynamic.
"Love Story" has a durable plot, and the movies often feature brave young men and women dying photogenically on screen.
In Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” based on an Esquire magazine article written by Matthew Teague, we witness many a familiar scene from the cancer movie blueprint (see “Love Story,” “Terms of Endearment,” ”The Fault in Our Stars,” et al.), from the noble patient who just might beat this thing but then suffers a setback to the loving friends and family members who are sometimes overwhelmed by everything but feel like they can’t complain, to the flashback sequences when life was relatively carefree and light, to the final farewell, which gets us every time.
It’s tough for a harrowing, essentially unrelenting film like this to break through to wider audiences, although Love Story (1970) and Terms Of Endearment (1983) are admittedly two exceptions to the rule, and recent teen dramas such as The Fault In Our Stars (2014) have also bucked the trend.
But they weren’t cheap, tear-jerker tears like those you might find in The Fault In Our Stars.
In Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” based on an Esquire magazine article written by Matthew Teague, we witness many a familiar scene from the cancer movie blueprint (see “Love Story,” “Terms of Endearment,” ”The Fault in Our Stars,” et al.), from the noble patient who just might beat this thing but then suffers a setback to the loving friends and family members who are sometimes overwhelmed by everything but feel like they can’t complain, to the flashback sequences when life was relatively carefree and light, to the final farewell, which gets us every time.
A terminal cancer patient hasn’t glowed this much with beauty since Rachel Weisz in The Fountain .